Adopting these lessons, we have embarked on the Vertebrate Genomes Project (VGP), an international effort to generate high-quality, complete reference genomes for all of the roughly 70,000 extant vertebrate species and to help to enable a new era of discovery across the life sciences.Ageing is a complex, multifaceted process leading to widespread functional decline that affects every organ and tissue, but it remains unknown whether ageing has a unifying causal mechanism or is grounded in multiple sources. Phenotypically, the ageing process is associated with a wide variety of features at the molecular, cellular and physiological level-for example, genomic and epigenomic alterations, loss of proteostasis, declining overall cellular and subcellular function and deregulation of signalling systems. However, the relative importance, mechanistic interrelationships and hierarchical order of these features of ageing have not been clarified. Here we synthesize accumulating evidence that DNA damage affects most, if not all, aspects of the ageing phenotype, making it a potentially unifying cause of ageing. Targeting DNA damage and its mechanistic links with the ageing phenotype will provide a logical rationale for developing unified interventions to counteract age-related dysfunction and disease.Cratons are Earth's ancient continental land masses that remain stable for billions of years. The mantle roots of cratons are renowned as being long-lived, stable features of Earth's continents, but there is also evidence of their disruption in the recent1-6 and more distant7-9 past. Despite periods of lithospheric thinning during the Proterozoic and Phanerozoic eons, the lithosphere beneath many cratons seems to always 'heal', returning to a thickness of 150 to 200 kilometres10-12; similar lithospheric thicknesses are thought to have existed since Archaean times3,13-15. Although numerous studies have focused on the mechanism for lithospheric destruction2,5,13,16-19, the mechanisms that recratonize the lithosphere beneath cratons and thus sustain them are not well understood. Here we study kimberlite-borne mantle xenoliths and seismology across a transect of the cratonic lithosphere of Arctic Canada, which includes a region affected by the Mackenzie plume event 1.27 billion years ago20. We demonstrate the important role of plume upwelling in the destruction and recratonization of roughly 200-kilometre-thick cratonic lithospheric mantle in the northern portion of the Slave craton. Using numerical modelling, we show how new, buoyant melt residues produced by the Mackenzie plume event are captured in a region of thinned lithosphere between two thick cratonic blocks. Our results identify a process by which cratons heal and return to their original lithospheric thickness after substantial disruption of their roots. This process may be widespread in the history of cratons and may contribute to how cratonic mantle becomes a patchwork of mantle peridotites of different age and origin.Molecular quantum gases (that is, ultracold and dense molecular gases) have many potential applications, including quantum control of chemical reactions, precision measurements, quantum simulation and quantum information processing1-3. For molecules, to reach the quantum regime usually requires efficient cooling at high densities, which is frequently hindered by fast inelastic collisions that heat and deplete the population of molecules4,5. Here we report the preparation of two-dimensional Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs) of spinning molecules by inducing pairing interactions in an atomic condensate near a g-wave Feshbach resonance6. The trap geometry and the low temperature of the molecules help to reduce inelastic loss, ensuring thermal equilibrium. From the equation-of-state measurement, we determine the molecular scattering length to be + 220(±30) Bohr radii (95% confidence interval). We also investigate the unpairing dynamics in the strong coupling regime and find that near the Feshbach resonance the dynamical timescale is consistent with the unitarity limit. Our work demonstrates the long-sought transition between atomic and molecular condensates, the bosonic analogue of the crossover from a BEC to a Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) superfluid in a Fermi gas7-9. In addition, our experiment may shed light on condensed pairs with orbital angular momentum, where a novel anisotropic superfluid with non-zero surface current is predicted10,11, such as the A phase of 3He.Glaciers distinct from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are shrinking rapidly, altering regional hydrology1, raising global sea level2 and elevating natural hazards3. Yet, owing to the scarcity of constrained mass loss observations, glacier evolution during the satellite era is known only partially, as a geographic and temporal patchwork4,5. Here we reveal the accelerated, albeit contrasting, patterns of glacier mass loss during the early twenty-first century. Using largely untapped satellite archives, we chart surface elevation changes at a high spatiotemporal resolution over all of Earth's glaciers. We extensively validate our estimates against independent, high-precision measurements and present a globally complete and consistent estimate of glacier mass change. We show that during 2000-2019, glaciers lost a mass of 267 ± 16 gigatonnes per year, equivalent to 21 ± 3 per cent of the observed sea-level rise6. https://www.selleckchem.com/products/stat3-in-1.html We identify a mass loss acceleration of 48 ± 16 gigatonnes per year per decade, explaining 6 tnagement of water resources and cryospheric risks, as well as for the global-scale mitigation of sea-level rise.Oxytocin (OXT; hereafter OT) and arginine vasopressin or vasotocin (AVP or VT; hereafter VT) are neurotransmitter ligands that function through specific receptors to control diverse functions1,2. Here we performed genomic analyses on 35 species that span all major vertebrate lineages, including newly generated high-contiguity assemblies from the Vertebrate Genomes Project3,4. Our findings support the claim5 that OT (also known as OXT) and VT (also known as AVP) are adjacent paralogous genes that have resulted from a local duplication, which we infer was through DNA transposable elements near the origin of vertebrates and in which VT retained more of the parental sequence. We identified six major oxytocin-vasotocin receptors among vertebrates. We propose that all six of these receptors arose from a single receptor that was shared with the common ancestor of invertebrates, through a combination of whole-genome and large segmental duplications. We propose a universal nomenclature based on evolutionary relationships for the genes that encode these receptors, in which the genes are given the same orthologous names across vertebrates and paralogous names relative to each other.